It's always a thrill for the locals when a commercial film crew comes calling, shooting a movie right there in their own back yard because there's just something about the place that they couldn't capture anywhere else. For the residents of Trona, California (population 1,800 and change), the thrill was all mixed up with the honor of having the star of Urban Legends: Final Cut declare that their town was "the worst place I've ever seen. And I've seen Third World poverty." Hart Bochner, the actor and writer-director of the forthcoming Just Add Water, actually prepared his new project with Trona in mind. He discovered the town years ago when a film he was working on in Bakersfield came to Trona for some night shoots. Apparently the sheer horror of it all — "It was beyond bleak and beyond heartbreaking and almost comical in the personality of the place, where at the center you have this decay where people are forgotten, and surrounding it was all of this exquisite beauty" — was something he needed to address as an artist in order to exorcise it from his psyche. Trona was set up in 1913 as a company town for the local borax mine. (The town, which is 170 miles northeast of L.A., takes its name from a mineral that the lake is rotten with.) It may be best known for its high school's dirt football field [pictured], said to be unique to the continental United States, though maybe some other towns have one but just prefer not to boast about it. (Because of the combination of the heat and the quality of the soil, grass won't grow there.) It has been featured in movies before — it was typecast as the post-apocalyptic landscape in Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes — but Just Add Water, which stars Dylan Walsh as a typically luckless resident of the town and Danny De Vito as his new friend, is almost certainly the first movie to actually have grown out of someone's attempt to grasp just what it might be like to be stuck there. Not that Bochner has anything against the people of Trona themselves. "The community," he says, "everyone was so sweet to us." Maybe they thought that if they were really sweet, he'd take them all with him when he left.